As a child, I saw python deities draped from branches, heard the stories of my ancestors who hid from European slavers among roots, and drank the medicinal teas and wild fruits gathered by my mother. But I grew up seeing these forests recede, and the health of both nature and people has suffered. Where I live, on the southern Ouemé plateau, just one third of the sacred forests recorded in 1980 remain. As a man, and as the Chief of my people, it has become my life’s mission to restore us all – our forests and ourselves.
“Vodún is a religion of the Earth. Each element has significance, and all our beliefs ultimately go back to the forests where we have lived, prayed and cured ourselves for generations”
My name is Chief Atawé Akôyi; I am the Chief and Prince of the Atawé community in Avrankou, in the east of Benin. In the time of my forefathers and the chiefs who came before me, Avrankou, like most of the country, was home to many great forests. These forests gave us shelter, food and medicine, and within them lay the sacred natural sites which are so important to our Vodún (Voodoo) culture. Vodún is a religion of the Earth. Each element has significance, and all our beliefs ultimately go back to the forests where we have lived, prayed and cured ourselves for generations.
My organisation was founded in 1996: Groupe de Recherche et d’Action pour le Bien-Être au Bénin (GRABE-BENIN, or the Research and Action group for Wellbeing in Benin). Every evening, after finishing my job with the local government, I would go out fundraising on my motorbike. Eventually, with a loan from the bank, I was able to buy half a hectare of land, and many people came together as a big family to begin what would be a transformative process for the health of our territory and kin.
Restoring our memory
My peers had cars at this point and thought me foolish for spending time in the forest. But I knew there was a different kind of richness: the wealth of medicinal plants, nutritional crops and spiritual connection that was kept alive by our indigenous cultures and then erased by colonialism and all that followed. We began our work by holding community dialogues with knowledgeable Elders to restore our memory of the ancient agroecological practices that enable humans to live in harmony with nature, producing food and medicine while supporting the health of the forests, rivers and wetlands around us. This revival has become our story of holistic healing.
Each community used to be responsible for taking care of its own sacred natural sites. In our cosmology, for example, I am not allowed to cut certain types of trees because they are my totems. Trees weren’t reduced to sources of wood or stores of carbon, as they are today; they were regarded as sheltering, healing, fruitful and inspiring companions in our Earth community. But when you don’t see something as sacred, you don’t protect it in the same way.
“Others may have the power of money, but we remember our connection to nature and have the power of Mother Earth”
As our ancestor Wangari Maathai said, “Trees have become, literally, totems of the clashes between different groups… invading forces have understood that sacred groves must not only be destroyed, but that such destruction is a way to demoralise, fragment and intimidate the local population by stripping it of its spiritual strengths.” Today, the fragments of forest still alive are in jeopardy. Industrial agriculture, urbanisation and mining are all encroaching on our ecological and cultural health. Whenever this pressure threatens to overwhelm us, I remind myself that others may have connections to authorities and the power of money, but we remember our connection to nature and have the power of Mother Earth.
Seeds are stories
“When we die, we go back to Mother Earth. I see agroecology as preparation for this: for becoming one”
We are guided in this endeavour by the philosophy and practice of Earth Jurisprudence, a philosophy in which humans are only one part of a wider community of beings and where the welfare of each member of that community is dependent on the welfare of the Earth as a whole. Its founding father, Thomas Berry, said we are not on Mother Earth, we come from Mother Earth. When we die, we go back to her. I see agroecology as preparation for this: for becoming one.
At GRABE-BENIN we have built a learning centre that offers agroecological training for the rural communities around us. This is a meeting place of much wisdom: women, community Elders, custodians, students and children. Here, we blend western and traditional learning but above all we bring people together with each other and with nature.
At the learning centre, women have revived their roles as custodians of seed and brought back our indigenous varieties. Like the wrinkly cowpeas that come in two colours, which we call sheep eyes and cow eyes. Eating cowpeas gives you strength, the roots are medicinal, and boiling the seeds makes alcohol. But seeds aren’t only for planting. Seeds are stories. Seeds are spirituality, knowledge and power. The women remember these cultural traditions, like how a mother will be given one sorghum seed to eat and one to plant for her child’s future during naming day ceremonies.
Decades ago, our parents used to eat more than 30 varieties of vegetables. But as our people have been sold to the ways of ‘modern’ agriculture, this number has been reduced to four or five. Why? Because of industrial values like efficiency and yield, which line wallets rather than stomachs. So over the past years, the women of our community have united to plant, harvest, forage and cook traditional varieties. They don’t need money to do this, just the seed. Today we are the only organisation in Benin with an ancestral vegetable garden, and when we eat its diversity, we and the land are healthier.
Weaving farming and forests back together
We have also remembered how to farm without chemicals. It is dangerous to give chemicals to human beings, as well as to our more-than-human kin. We are all connected, and when we harm nature, we harm ourselves. It doesn’t make sense to destroy ancient forests for annual agricultural production; we need to weave farming and forests back together again.
“Millet is for one year, but a breadfruit tree is forever”
One of my favourite trees, the breadfruit, is important because it sustains us through the dry season when there aren’t crops to harvest. It is versatile – pound it, fry it, boil it – and it is very nutritious, full of magnesium and potassium. These big fruits, ripening at a difficult moment of the year, are like gifts. So nowadays I have breadfruit trees in our learning centre nursery, and we are replanting them across the region. There are local mango, orange, lemon, papaya and avocado varieties too. Millet is for one year, but a breadfruit tree is forever.
Sacred natural sites
In the nursery, we also raise plants to make living boundaries around our sacred natural sites. Sacred natural sites are the oldest ‘conservation areas’ in the world, having been protected by Indigenous custodians for time immemorial. They are safe homes for animals and plants, and they exist in a network across lands and waters, so their health is integral to the resilience of the entire ecosystem.
Culturally, they are home to our ancestors, offering us a connection to the spiritual world. They are no-go zones for cutting wood, hunting animals and foraging food; instead of extracting, we go there with offerings. Usually, we take seeds or oil from cocoa or palm, and if we don’t have these offerings because we have forgotten how to grow or cook them, we are missing something. Our ancestors can tell if the seeds were bought from a shop rather than gathered from nature or grown from our soils. Spiritually, there is no value in food that has been genetically modified, covered in chemicals or bought from a shop. Food must be grown, and given, with respect for the Earth that it is a part of. These potent sites are the heart of our communities and our governance systems; protecting them from degradation or ‘development’ has profound significance.
Our sacred natural sites are also a source of medicinal plants and herbs, which grow with the trees as well as amongst crops on diverse agroecological farms. As a child, my mother would prepare a variety of medicinal teas for me to drink when I woke up, called Amasi ɖiɖa, or Tôligbé in my local language. We drank moringa to give us strength, thanks to its high mineral content. We used basil, an antibiotic, to fight off infections. We drank ginger and ripe papaya to aid our digestion, as well as the leaves of the papaya tree to help prevent malaria. After eating, we would chew on crushed sticks of lemongrass to clean our teeth.
“In my culture we say ‘don’t break the canoe that helped you cross the river’”
At GRABE-BENIN we are rediscovering this knowledge of harvesting medicine alongside harvesting food from plants. Customary, natural cures are vital for the health of 70% of our communities, who don’t go to hospital or can’t afford ‘modern’ healthcare. We are thankful to have western medicine too; it has its place if carefully used. But in my culture, we say “don’t break the canoe that helped you cross the river”.
The philosophy and practice of Earth Jurisprudence
I have learnt much along the way, and most of all from the nature of the forests themselves. I am especially grateful for the lesson of unity: that as healthy individuals, we contribute to a healthy whole. We get back what we put into this reciprocal system, held together by our sacred natural sites. If you kill plants and insects with chemicals, you are killing yourself; it is like planting pineapple and looking for lemons. What you contribute comes around. This is justice according to the laws of nature. Modern humans have been causing harm, and now it up to us to heal nature – and ourselves – by reviving and being inspired by indigenous ways that are governed by the laws of nature.
We do not walk alone. As an Earth Jurisprudence Practitioner, I am part of the African Earth Jurisprudence Collective: a wider constellation of communities across East, West and Southern Africa. We are all returning to our roots, both physically in the forest and spiritually in our hearts. Rather than relying on top-down, ‘conservationist’ or ‘development’ interventions to look after us, we are enabling knowledgeable Elders to revive and share their own ecological knowledge and practices with their communities. This is how we are taking responsibility for the health of our people and our ancestral lands. We are on the frontlines of an intensifying race for land, money, fossil fuels and minerals. In response, we root deeper, back to the pre-colonial wisdom that holds us steady, which we learnt from the body of Mother Earth.
This story formed part of Rooted Magazine’s issue on cultivating health and healing